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Glancing at the white-haired girl, I tensed at the creature sitting beside her. Its two tails lashed angrily, golden spots decorated its hide, and two stubby antlers crowned its feline head.
A lynx.
I’d seen them in my wanderings.
I’d heard them snarl as they hunted in the night.
The girl rested her hand on the lynx’s head. “Come back with me. I’ll introduce you to the Nhil. I think it’s important that you speak to Solin.”
I sat on my haunches, twisting to check the pinprick wounds on my back. “I have to return to Salak. He’ll be wondering where I am.”
“Salak is your family?”
I nodded and stood.
Holding out my hand, inviting another hiss from the lynx, I said, “Come with me. You have to come with me.”
The girl shook her head sadly. “I can’t. The Nhil people are the reason I’m alive. I can’t just leave without telling them.”
“So tell them,” I growled, slipping back into an easier language. “Tell them that we’ve found each other after too much time apart and you no longer need them.”
She ran her hands over the lynx’s head. “But I do need them.”
Her confession struck me in the chest.
She still didn’t feel it.
Didn’t feel the fiery bond or the absolute rightness.
To her, I was just a stray. And unlike Salak, who’d taken me into his pack, she wanted to cast me out of it.
Anger slipped through me again.
Rejection dripped like ice down my spine.
I tried one last time.
“I can’t be the only one feeling this way.” Stalking into her, I grabbed her wrist. “Touch me, taste me. Let your heart guide you instead of your—”
The lynx moved too fast.
In a golden-spotted blur, it leapt on me, sinking its fangs into my forearm, biting down.
Hard.
Teeth crunched against bone. I bellowed. I scrambled for its muzzle, blazing agony ripping through me.
“Syn!” the girl yelled, trying to grab the lynx as I tripped backward, yanking my arm, tearing flesh, unable to get it out of the beast’s jaws.
“Syn, let him go!”
The deeper the cat bit me, the more words and mortality flew from my mind. I sank into the darkness where Salak and his hunters dwelled. I embraced their furiousness. I bared my teeth. I let hot, black heat unfurl through me.
Shadows seeped and thickened around my legs.
The girl gasped.
The lynx hissed and bit me deeper, its fangs tearing tendons and other important things.
I roared and tore its teeth out of my arm, knocking the beast away.
I growled as loud and as deep as any alpha, and the ground rumbled.
The cat sprang for me again—its pounce messy and mouth bloody.
I struck it in the chest, sending it sprawling to the crushed grass below.
My forearm was shredded. Muscle gleamed rich red while white bone vanished beneath pulses of spilling blood.
My fingers didn’t feel normal.
Pain flushed my body as sweat broke out over my chest.
My eyes turned hazy as more shades curled around me.
Shades I didn’t summon yet seemed to cloak me, waiting for my decree.
I looked at the white-haired girl.
At the way she clasped both hands over her mouth and stayed rooted to the spot. I drank in her face, her figure, and the faint golden glow that’d appeared over her skin.
“You always glow when I kiss you.” I brushed my lips on hers.
“Only because you make my heart spill with light.” She kissed me back. “Now stop talking and—”
My spine cracked as the vision ripped through my mind. “Please...” I gasped around the scalding torture in my arm. “See what I see. That’s all I ask. See me.”
Her eyes flared, and for a fragile, wonderful moment, there was something. A warmth, a spark, the barest crack in her memories.
It sent me tripping into her, bleeding all over the grass, not caring that my feet moved in shadow. “You remembered something. What? What did you—”
The lynx caterwauled and launched at me again, going for my ankle, its savage teeth ready to rip out my calf. My shadows hissed around it, coiling around its two tails, smothering it in sudden darkness.
The lynx howled, snapping at each shade before pouncing at me, its teeth grazing my thigh.
I stumbled backward, my eyes never leaving hers.
I waited for her to choose me like I’d chosen her.
I begged her to call off the beast and let me touch her. Remind her. Give us a chance at being happy after such misery.
But...she didn’t.
She hung her head and whispered, “You need a healer. Go. Before she hurts you again.”
I had no healer.
But at least I had a wolf pack that’d treated me far better than she had.
My heart shattered as the choice was made for me.
I wasn’t welcome.
I’d found her only to lose her all over again.
With sorrow burning and pain drenching my system, I looked at the female who was supposed to be mine, the girl I’d kissed and worshiped in my dreams, then summoned the shadow’s swift darkness.
